Tankha

Very delicious oolong. I got 3 very flavorful steeps! The first one was a bit woody and one dimensional, and I was a little dissapointed! But the second and the third more than made up for the first – very sweet/honeyed, ever so slightly floral, very TEA ish. I dare say tea with a little lemon!

The package called for a much lower temperature than I’m used to using for oolongs, but it seemed to have worked well – not a hint of bitterness or astringency.

I also suspect this one would be great iced. I have to try a cold brew of this!

I have reached a real turning point in my tea drinking. I love a once in awhile special treat of a robust black tea with milk and sugar, or a flavored black dessert tea with milk and sugar, but my every day craving has turned toward any tea that can be taken plain. Ch-ch-ch-ch- changes!

When I say Oooo…
You say LONG…

Ooooo…

LONG…

Sorry…I’m currently obsessed with this song/video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eELH0ivexKA

Anyhow…another MandyB Tea! YAY!

This is mellow in scent and taste but pleasant and yummy. I’m thinking this would also be good cold/iced!

The Simple Leaf is two for two with me.

This is a complex tea…and so probably destined to become one of my favorites. I chose this for this evening because of the leaves, which are quite lovely in their variegated appearance.

Tankha, it must be said, is remarkably similar to Samovar’s Royal Garland while hot. It’s not nearly as rich, and it’s a lighter cup of tea by all accounts, but there are striking similarities…the fruity, shining darjeeling flavor with a lingering, nectary, honeysuckle element. It lacks the thicker taste of dense fruit…and yet I hesitate to call it ‘floral’, though I suppose there’s something to that toward the last of the sip, and definitely some of that in the nose. I’m…actually having trouble pinning down flavors with any adequacy. I would not mistake this tea for Royal Garland…and yet, comparing the two is the closest I can get.

The second steep brews to a slightly darker shade, and produces a softer flavor…with, interestingly, a distinct aroma of lemons, without the sharpness you would expect.

Yum…yum…yum.

This is the kind of tea you can drink for about a week straight and just not get tired of it! I enjoyed it quite a bit with just a little vanilla soy creamer and some sweetener. It’s just so good. I drank it while I was on a hiatus from steepster. (Life just got a little too busy!!) I would recommend this to anyone who enjoys unflavored black teas. It really is delicious.

It was one of those days. Clumsy like a very hot place. At mid-afternoon I was thinking if we couldn’t just skip the rest of today and go straight on with tomorrow. I needed a cup of tea really badly and actually had one planned until I came home and face to face with the to-be-finished pile. Right then. My conscience bid me to look through that first, and as I did I discovered a tea from Bethany that I had completely forgotten I had! First win of the day. No, really. First win.

I actually needed a cup so badly that I just brewed it up and quite forgot to even look at the leaves. I didn’t even think to look up what sort of tea it was. Let’s just say that I was lucky it wasn’t a fragile green…

After having steeped it though, I looked it up and read the description. The colour was golden as promised and the aroma was floral and somewhat wood-y also as promised. There were some talk about notes of tropical fruit too, but I couldn’t find any of that.

The flavour had the same sort of wood-y, almost rooibos-y note. What is it with me finding rooibos-y notes in indian teas lately? First that decaf indian vanilla thing from Numi the other day (the one with the Cup of DOOM!) and now this? Again, nothing on the tropical fruit front, though.

I’m not a fan of the wooden rooibos note, especially considering that there isn’t any rooibos in it at all. I like oolongs but I swing towards the greener chinese ones, generally. I have yet to meet an indian oolong that I fell for. This one is from Darjeeling and even though a lot of black Darjeeling teas are technically borderline oolong, an actual oolong from the area just tastes kind of unfinished. I’ve had a Darjeeling oolong before, but that was years ago and I honestly can’t remember anything about it, so I can’t tell if this is characteristic or not.

The dry leaves are really attractive. There is more variation in appearance from leaf to leaf than any other pure tea I have had; the leaves range from green, light, and thin to dark brown, thick, and twisted.

The smell… intersect a standard Darjeeling with a Rooibos, and add just a drop of grape soda. It is very mild and nice. The taste is even milder. The Darjeeling muscatel notes definitely come through. There is a woodiness, like a tree that is old enough to not smell green anymore, but too young to have the deeper aromas of old bark. There is a hint of baking soda, and after the last sip a light sweetness lingers.

The other day, i went to a tea tasting at the mostly excellent Goldfish Tea in Royal Oak, MI. One of the teas was an oolong, a Wuyi Yan Cha. It was not bad, and the aroma was captivating and powerful, but the liquor was so astringent! But, even steeped with more leaves than Simple Leaf recommends, Tankha is still smooth. Even on the rare occasion astringency results, it is slight. I can’t recall ever having a proper tea that was less mild. It is almost hard to believe that Tankha and Wuyi Yan Cha are even the same type of tea, save for the woody notes.

This mildness is what made Tankha so hard to rate. I’ve had it for several months but have never been able to put my thoughts together on it. Use too few leaves and the resulting brew is too close to being water. There’s almost nothing to be afraid of as far as using too many leaves, other than using up your stash!

So, stay away if you like your oolongs with a kick, but it’s very pleasant.

This tea has large, beautiful, multi-colored leaves that brew into a golden liquor with a sweet fragrance with hints of incense. The tea is from Darjeeling and I detect in it that same Darjeeling floral fragrance. The taste encourages a kind a lazy sensuality as it spreads its floral complexities across my taste buds. It is surprisingly light in taste for an oolong. As it cools a bit, the incense begins to come out in the taste as well as the aroma.

Plowing through this insane stash that I’ve built up in the non-winter months. I have several 1 oz. sample packages from The Simple Leaf; Honeybee, another oolong, is the one that I’ve returned to more than once, while the others have been neglected. Tankha is very, very sweet for an oolong – not roasty or syrupy at all, but light and with a slight floral taste. I prefer my oolongs savory and roasty, so this wouldn’t be an everyday tea, but I’ll definitely revisit it from time to time.

This tea is very subtly floral. It’s really nice and I just sucked down a whole mug in ten minutes. Guess I liked it!

This is what motivated me to wake up in the morning. I love Darjeeling oolongs; because of how diverse they are. This particular assortment of greens, blacks, and golds was not the exception. The brew was incredibly light. It brewed up a cup with the scent of fresh trees and morning dew. The taste was a light mixture of minerals and hay. This brew carried a vegetal grassy undertone. I feel that if this brew was any lighter it would float away, (My bad joke for the day…)